Over relatively recent years, data communications satellite systems have proven to be indispensable in meeting the goals of universal broadband connectivity, disaster response management and national security. The advent of high-throughput satellites with narrow Ka-band spot beams that facilitate spectral reuse has increased both aggregate and per-user data rates, enabling competitive Internet access over satellite transport. Today, such satellite systems primarily employ geo-synchronous orbit (GEO) satellites, however, with rapidly evolving space, networking and digital processing technologies, medium earth orbit (MEO) and low earth orbit (LEO), satellite systems are becoming more feasible. Such advances are facilitating the availability of high-capacity and low-cost satellite transports comprising GEO, MEO and LEO satellite systems (including combinations of different orbit satellites in the same system), with multiple bands, including L, X, Ku and Ka.
Further, unlike the terrestrial wireless ecosystem, which benefits from universal standards (such as 4G/LTE and Wi-Fi), the satellite communications industry has had limited success with waveform level interoperability across service providers and modem families. For example, FIG. 1 depicts a broadband satellite communications system operated by one or more service providers. The recent advances with narrow spot beams (e.g., in Ka-band), and spectrally efficient waveforms (e.g., DVB-S2 waveforms), have resulted in large aggregate system capacities and individual terminal data rates in an HTS system. A service provider operates their management system with automated terminal commissioning and satellite transport performance and fault data collection. This service provider management system maintains configuration databases that include network and RF transport-related parameter values refined to support the expected service level agreement for the user of the terminal. The satellite transport waveform describes the physical, data link, and to some extent, network layer interoperability between the terminal modem and the gateway modem. The user networks at remote and gateway sites are connected to the terminal modem with standards such as Ethernet and IP. The service provider configures bandwidth available for various forward and return links between a gateway and the associated terminals supported by the gateway. For example, a bandwidth pool is assigned to a gateway based on longer term business arrangements and service commitments. This pool can be sub-allocated dynamically by the gateway-level resource allocation function for supporting specific Radio Frequency (RF) links at various data rates.
Current high-throughput satellites, with 100+ Gbps throughput, have about 30 times higher capacity compared to wideband satellites (for example traditional Ku-band) and provide the first foundational feature in providing order-of-magnitude improvement. Becoming widely deployed worldwide, such high-throughput satellites can be leveraged for customer applications. A global or regional network operations center (NOC) orchestrates operations across multiple gateways operated by respective service providers. The NOC typically manages definitions for service-level agreements (SLAs) comprising factors, such as data rates, availability, packet loss and delay, which are associated with business agreements between a service provider and a customer. The NOC also collects processed fault, performance, security and accounting data from multiple gateways (via a management system) for global situational awareness and business management.
In such architectures, all requirements, under both routine and abnormal operating conditions, are met with a single service provider and a single satellite. There are, however, many realities that can compromise such simplistic assumptions, such as in the case of customers who require data communications (e.g., broadband satellite communications) over large geographical areas, and who are sensitive to price and operational constraints associated with a single service provider. This becomes especially difficult when satellite systems can be compromised, for example, by adversarial actions such as accidental or purposeful jamming of radio signals and cyber or physical attacks on terminals and gateways. Under such situations, the customer may require the flexibility to switch terminals between different satellites and also potentially between different service providers.
Problematically, though, since the use of standard waveforms is not a common industry practice across service providers, satellite or service provider transitioning may require the use of different modems within the satellite user terminal. In addition to physically swapping the modems (e.g., replacing modem X from service provider X to modem Y from service provider Y), the user and the service providers also need to undertake several manual steps for supporting the new modem and respective waveform. These steps require ad hoc communication between operations of service provider management systems and the operators at the NOC. Additionally, such transitions may require a significant amount of configuration at the gateway management system and terminal, manual steps for antenna pointing, RF transport reconfiguration and terminal commissioning at the remote terminal site. These manual steps in turn impose the prerequisite of business analysis and acquisition of satellite service/bandwidth with the new service provider, which can be time consuming (e.g., taking weeks to months) and overly expensive.
Further, today's satellite communications systems (e.g., at broadband rates) are primarily based on GEO orbit satellites. With the launch of systems based on lower orbit satellites (such as the O3B system based on MEO satellites), and plans for systems based on LEO satellites, or a combination of different orbit level satellites, interoperability across satellites would provide more flexibility and facilitate a larger trade space, with expanded benefits in coverage and lower delays in satellite data transport (e.g., round trip transmission delays via the satellites).
What is needed, therefore, are approaches for flexible satellite terminals that support multiple modems and waveforms, facilitating interoperability with multiple satellites (e.g., of differing bands, waveforms, orbit levels, etc.).